Reply #13: Eyewitness Estimate of March Numberes

[Wiley50]

From Jill at OSAG

i haven't read over all these emails. i don't have time. i was filming the march. it left the monumento at about 11am. arrived in the centro around 2pm. that's three hours.

when we were entering the centro (passing La Soledad / Plaza de la Danza) someone called a reporter friend of mine from the monumento and said people were still leaving from there in the march.

so that sounds like a ton of people to me, and a hell of a lot more than 80,000. i've seen marches of 80,000 people and this was way more. WAY more.

counting the numbers once the march started to enter the centro is not accurate, because from what i saw, there wasn't enough space for people, and a lot of people turned off onto other streets and dispered. In other words, not everyone went all the way to santo domingo.

the number of people who are involved in the APPO or who guarded barricades has nothing to do with the number of people who came out in the march. Marches are for everyone, guarding barricades is not. The march was headed by municipal authorities from all the regions of Oaxaca. People from those regions came with their authorities, so this wasn't just a march of people from Oaxaca city, nor was it a march of just APPO participants.

i think La Jornada's estimate is very low.

from K. Flores at OSAG:

i think the pictures all around, universal, the website from brazil, these: pretty much somes it up as far as support for appo and the teachers...if people want to do a numbers thing, i would suggest a scale weighing this march w/the anti-appo/pri one i read about a week or so ago...what did they estimate on the high end? a thousand---these pics show the people coming down hills from everywhere, hardly any space to move...the megamarches in LA were similar, no where to move and in the numbers game...the police said tens of thousands, and the la times at 500k , the conversitive estimate of the media

jill